Relaunching the working-class, internationalist initiative against the imperialist war in Ukraine and the preparation of a new world massacre
More than a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some facts appear indisputable:
1. Far from being on its way to ending, or even just stopping with a temporary truce, the ongoing war between OTAN and Russia in Ukrainian territory knows a continuous escalation with unpredictable outcomes. It is particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland that are furiously pushing for the massacre to continue and expand “to the last Ukrainian.” The decision of the International Criminal Court in The Hague to indict Putin, and the supply of increasingly offensive and lethal weapons to Kiev – most recently fighter bombers and depleted uranium bullets – leave no doubt about it. Zelensky’s Ukraine has been given orders to engage Russia on the ground and provoke it until its forces are totally exhausted, to the point of self-destruction.
2. The start of the “special military operation” by Putin’s Russia was not an insane act of desperation, but a strategically weighted decision by the Russian government to pursue the interests of its own bourgeoisie and monopolies, taking the competition with the U.S., the EU and their allies for control of resources, infrastructure and trade routes, markets and strategic territories, into the military terrain as well. In the midst of the terrible bloodbath of this new war, the claim is being openly advanced – not only from Moscow – for “a new multipolar world order.” The decision to invade Ukraine was in fact taken by the Russian government knowing that in addition to its “strategic partner” China, a number of regional powers would back it, or be on its side or at least keep a non-hostile position. These powers, when they do not express open hostility to the Euro-Atlantic imperialist bloc, at least do not acknowledge the U.S.-led “unipolar” world as the only possible horizon for the assertion of the interests of their own bourgeoisies.
3. The outbreak of open war between OTAN and Russia in Ukraine is causing a rapid dislocation of forces between and within the imperialist blocs. The U.S. has taken advantage of Russia’s move to deal the EU, and especially Germany, very hard blows both in energy supplies and with regard to building trade axes with China. This has caused an abrupt halt to drives for “autonomization” from the United States by the EU and individual member countries. But Macron’s recent sortie shows that among EU top leaders, not only in Paris, there is nevertheless an intention to somehow protect their interests from the old superpower’s brutal blackmail. Important changes in foreign policy are also affecting Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, the entire Middle East, and are related to the intense weaving of economic and diplomatic threads that Beijing is putting in place on a global scale, through bilateral relations, the Brics, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Belt and Road Initiative, etc. In this framework of extreme confusion all the big and medium-sized powers are moving to carve out their own “living space” and resources, and to shift the risk of a violent explosion of class antagonisms away from themselves and offload it onto their competitors.
4. The contenders in this new war at the centre of Europe, far from staging an aseptic and “intelligent” war fought solely and exclusively by robot soldiers and drones, are using all the most technologically advanced weaponry and innovations available in the military field in a very bloody war fought in the field (like the “old” wars) by hundreds of thousands of soldiers, with terrible destruction of human lives, environment and mechanical equipment, thus giving a pale idea of what an apocalyptic catastrophe a new world war in the middle of the 21st century could be for both human kind and nature.
5. The current war in Ukraine increasingly appears – as we have argued from the onset – to be the first step in this direction, an epochal turning point. After two decades of traumatic events, this war indicates where global capitalism is heading to try to solve what increasingly appears to be a historical crisis of his; a crisis that shows no signs of slowing down also on the economic-financial level, as evidenced by the recent bank failures in the U.S. and Europe, and by the economic consequences of the pandemic that have particularly affected the supply chains of Western countries. A frenzied global arms race has begun with gigantic military spending plans, from Germany to China, Japan to Australia. European Industry Commissioner Breton did not mince words: “The EU defence industry must shift to a war economy model”, pointing to the immediate priority in rapidly producing the millions of artillery shells the Ukrainian military needs. Manoeuvres foreshadowing new war clashes even at relatively short notice are underway in the Balkans, in West Africa, around Taiwan. No one can know, not even the leaders of the great powers, the timing of the precipitation of this global process. But the direction of movement is given. The old Stars and Stripes world order, which Washington and Wall Street would have claimed to make eternal, is over. The transition to a new “multipolar” world order will in no way be peaceful and painless. Those who go telling this express a position opposed to the interests of the proletariat and the oppressed masses around the globe: a “multipolar” world, structurally made up of imperialist camps in heated and constant competition with each other, will produce an ever more acute tendency to war, and a global deterioration in the living and working conditions of the working class.
6. The war in Ukraine is a war against the Ukrainian and Russian proletarians, both forced to slaughter each other for the interests of their own exploiters and, in the case of the Ukrainians, also for the interests of the imperialist alliances and institutions – OTAN, EU, IMF – to which the Kiev government reports. It is, at the same time, a war with heavy fallouts also on the workers of countries that, for now, do not have their own troops massively on the ground. We are by no means indifferent to the desire of most of the populations of the Donbass affected by Kiev’s ethnic cleansing to join the Russian Federation, nor to the refusal of the populations of much of Ukraine to accept subordination to a Russia that has nothing to do with the USSR, and with the history of brotherhood of the peoples and nationalities that lived within those borders. But in this war their aspirations play no role, as they are subjugated on the one hand to the project of the Putin power bloc to reconstitute the “great millennial Russia” of centuries past, and on the other hand to the exploitative and domineering interests of the US-OTAN-EU bloc, which are forcing them to fight and die for them, and certainly not for themselves.
7. As has been the case in the past, capital’s wars act as an inexorable watershed between opportunism –which more or less well masks chauvinism and nationalism – and the working-class revolutionary, internationalist line. The acquisition of this awareness at the international level is necessary if the proletariat is to return as a protagonist on the stage of the class struggle. The recent massive strike movements and labour demonstrations in France, Britain and Greece are very significant signs of awakening, at present decidedly insufficient to halt the march toward a new world war, but should be looked upon with optimism. For in their diversity and complexity they are the product of the insuperable irreconcilability between the profiteering interests of capital and the welfare of the proletariat and the non-exploiting classes, and they show that even in Europe the conditions exist for a new advance of the labour movement in the 21st century.
8. Italy, the Italian imperialism, well represented in its various articulations and fractions by the co-existing declinations given by the President Mattarella and the prime minister Meloni, is an integral and active part of this process of global inter-capitalist confrontation. Despite the internal frictions within its majority, the right-wing government is helping to advance the war-mongering plans of OTAN and the EU with less hypocrisy than Draghi&Co., and to mount an anti-Russian and anti-Chinese campaign with heated chauvinistic overtones. The war-war propaganda-war economy dynamic – with the boosting of military spending and the shipment of arms to Ukraine through 2023 – goes increasingly hand in hand with the intensification of the anti-proletarian attack on the “home front.” We see this in economic policy decisions, in the unlimited aggressiveness of the bosses at workplaces and in the labour market, in propaganda manoeuvring in favour of the petty-bourgeoisie, in state crimes against emigrants and immigrants, in the ubiquitous intervention of the police wherever there are real labour and social conflicts, in “exemplary” sentences against anarchist militants, in the following of revisionist lunges on the historical level, in the obscene re-proposition of an ideology and model of the “traditional family” radically hostile to women. The “normality” of capitalist exploitation, the attempt to compact the widest possible consensus around “national interests”, are as always easily transposable, in the event of military escalation, into a level of internal warfare, of internal enemy-building apt to maintain and reinforce class policies in the context of imperialist warfare.
The executives change, the composition of parliaments changes, but our enemy is always here, “at home”: it is the Italian imperialist capitalism, which at this moment wears the face of the Meloni government, the state apparatus at the service of the bourgeois class. Within this framework, Italy remains in the handful of countries that exploit and oppress the working classes of the entire world, with the Italian bourgeoisie scurrying for better positions in inter-capitalist contention by leveraging the imperialist alliances to which it belongs. Notably, the first explicitly post-fascist-led executive of the postwar period has already divested itself of the “anti-establishment” and anti-EU tones with which it had cleverly capitalized on the discontent of intermediate and petty-bourgeois social strata in the election campaign, showing itself immediately ready to work to the best advantage of the interests of the big bourgeoisie and financial markets.
The frontal attack on the “citizenship income” and the outright rejection of any hypothesis of introducing a minimum wage – claimed by the prime minister even from the stage of the CGIL congress – represent measures in which the ability to respond on a propaganda level to the appetites of the parasitic petty bourgeoisie coexist with the much more concrete capability of perpetuating the downward spiral of wages that has marked the Italian labour market for decades. The government is ready to vigorously defend this set-up made up of contractual fragmentation, precariousness, pirate collective agreements, informal work and “systemic” tax and contribution evasion from which all levels of enterprises have benefited – first and foremost the big monopolies. Alongside this is the dense and inextricable maze of contracts and subcontracts, useful as a recruitment pool of unskilled labour, with wages largely below the subsistence threshold and, not coincidentally, composed mainly of those immigrants to whom the government has declared war without quarter, on the one hand increasing their deaths at sea, and on the other making it almost impossible to acknowledge residence permits and citizenship for those who arrive in Italy.
Within this framework are the two major reforms that the government has put on its agenda and toward which it is already speedily marching: on the one hand, the tax reform, aimed at affirming the regressivity of taxes according to the flat-tax model, “the more you have, the less you pay” and vice versa; on the other hand, the so-called “differentiated autonomy” of Italy’s regions, recently drafted in the Calderoli bill, which will lead to the definitive dismantling of the National Health System, condemning a large part of Southern Italy to extreme forms of social decay and to the blackmail of regional wages. So, these first six months of Meloni’s government – similarly to what we have been able to observe with the right-wing governments of Trump, Bolsonaro and Orban – demonstrate how the “sovereignist” rhetoric is nothing more than a mask behind which the support for employers’ interests also takes the form of the most unrestrained and savage liberalism.
9. More than a year after the invasion of Ukraine, we must acknowledge that there is no real mass movement against the war at the moment, either in Italy or in Europe. Pacifist initiatives have largely been marked by a pro-Ukraine and therefore objectively pro-NATO orientation. They have hardly ever seriously considered, much less denounced, the long-term manoeuvres of the U.S.-OTAN-EU bloc in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and, specifically, Ukraine, the shift of NATO forces 1,000 km to the East. A peace that is not as infamous as the current war, a just peace between the peoples of Ukraine and Russia, however far away it is today, can only and exclusively be the fruit of a rediscovered class fraternity between the proletarians of Ukraine and Russia – the fraternity that was there in the past thanks to the October Revolution and the common struggle against Nazi-fascism. The obligatory step in this direction is certainly not the “victory of Ukraine,” that is, the victory of OTAN, but the defeat of both opposed imperialist fronts. Which means, for people in Italy and the EU, working relentlessly for the defeat of “our own” government, the EU, OTAN. This is the best contribution we can make to the Ukrainian and Russian workers so that they will be freed as soon as possible from the nightmare of the continuation of the war for years and years on.
10. In the absence of a real mass anti-war movement with working-class connotations both in Italy and on an international scale, the positions that identify Russia and China – both countries in a stage of mature capitalist development – as supposedly “anti-imperialist”, do exert a certain influence, both in Italy and internationally, together with the positions of those that are even willing to endorse Russia and China’s propaganda of their foreign policy choices – and in this juncture Russia’s justifications for the war. In recent weeks the “peace” proposal put forward by the Chinese government has effectively summarized the image with which China wants to present itself globally, outlining as beneficial “for all” the prospect of a transition from the unipolar world dominated by the United States and its allies, to a multipolar world in which everything would magically return to equilibrium, with the opening of a long era of peace and general co-prosperity. Those who intentionally advocate these positions and the propaganda with which the capitalist classes of Russia and China arm themselves to fight the all-out confrontation for the partitioning of the world market, perform the reactionary function of deceiving the masses, urging them to side with a new world order not dissimilar in its substance from the previous one, insofar as it is still and in any case a capitalist order, that is based on the class division existing today throughout the world (Russia and China perfectly included) and on the exploitation and oppression of workers, wage earners, poor peasants, semi-proletarians, by capitalists who own, in individual, collective or state form, the means and conditions of production and social reproduction. The immediate task of revolutionary and internationalist forces is to politically combat the propaganda favouring the illusion of a peaceful (and worker-friendly) multipolar world. We stress once again that proletarians, the exploited, the peoples, have no interest in siding with one or another of the imperialist powers, with one or another alliance that serves the interests of the capitalists. In both cases, these are not secondary aspects to what has moved so far in the variegated pacifist world, but central aspects in the process of building a movement that really fights against imperialist war, since they are capable of determining the effectiveness or inconclusiveness of the movement itself.
As far as we are concerned, through a period of in-depth discussion, our organizations came to jointly promote the Rome conference of October 16 in which we clarified and denounced the imperialist nature of the war in Ukraine, and expressed the need to build a mass, class-based, internationalist opposition to the war — for a strategic battle totally untethered from any interest that the different fractions of the national and international bourgeoisie have within the current global framework. The path we took from the October 16 conference to the Dec. 3 demonstration in Rome, where we marched together in a united working-class section alongside SI Cobas workers in the rally of grassroots and combative unionism, and more recently, during the February 24-25 demonstrations, has reinforced the need for a common work against the war, against the Meloni government, against OTAN and the EU. The realization that, despite one year of incessant war propaganda, there remains at the mass level an anti-war sentiment, has strengthened in us the determination to bring among workers, the unemployed, students, the working-class point of view on the war in Ukraine, on the trend towards a new world war, on the crisis of the system.
The time has come to vigorously relaunch the initiative against the war in Ukraine and the tendency toward a new world massacre, doing the impossible to get out of the ghetto in which they want to lock us up. There is nothing more topical and needed than the internationalism of “proletarians of all countries unite” against a capitalist social system that no longer has anything “progressive” to give the human kind, and is characterized by increasing destructiveness. We are aware that the affirmation of this class-based, revolutionary, internationalist perspective can only come about through a series of very arduous tests: we are determined to meet them. The recent events in France, Britain, Greece – just to mention the last few months and Europe alone – show that under a seemingly stagnant social surface, immense inflammable substances have accumulated due to the endless series of material sacrifices, uncertainty, inner sufferings that the owning classes have been imposing for decades on working women and men, with an extra load for the new generations.
May Day will be an important test of the accumulation of forces along this trajectory. But we are looking beyond it. So we have decided to call a national assembly on June 11 in Milan to call together all social, political, trade union organisations, as well as individual militants willing to fight together with us to relaunch a class-based, internationalist initiative against the imperialist war, and bring it consciously to life in the mobilizations of the coming months.